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Writing Machines — Their Uses and Meaning

By Steve Lohr September 12, 2011 10:25 amSeptember 12, 2011 10:25 am

A Sunday business column in The New York Times looked at the work of a start-up, Narrative Science, that combines computer science and journalism. Its software takes data and converts it into stories — short summary-style articles so far, but ones that don’t really read as if they were written by a machine.

The early applications include translating sports statistics, housing data and financial reports into text stories. But its founders and investors also see a potentially far larger opportunity. They say all kinds of data inside corporations and governments could be analyzed and become more understandable and useful to humans, if it were translated into narrative form.

The media business may be the Petri dish for this technology, while the real payoff proves to be in the analysis and reporting of corporate and government data, said David Rosenblatt, a former Google executive who is an investor in Narrative Science.

In the corporate market, Mr. Rosenblatt pointed to the flood of new data that inundates advertising agencies and marketing managers, especially for online campaigns — information on media-buying, impressions, click-throughs, ad network tracking and so on. An automated helper to sift through all the data, find trends and present its conclusions in comprehensible English rather than a spreadsheet would be a powerful tool, Mr. Rosenblatt said.

For people who value words, the scientists at Narrative Science have good news. Up to now, the computer tools for helping people make sense of data have mostly been on-screen dashboards that distill mounds of information into graphs or symbols resembling traffic lights — green is good, red is bad.

“Story is a much more accessible medium,” said Kristian Hammond, chief technology officer of Narrative Science and a professor at Northwestern University. “It expresses what’s most important and expresses it first, and in words so it’s understandable to humans.”

“The narrative rules in terms of cognition,” Mr. Hammond said.

All powerful tools tend to be double-edged, which has been true of technology since the earliest days (fire could cook your food or burn your hut down).

The technology Narrative Science is pushing raises Internet-era concerns. “The worry is for a company like Google,” said Oren Etzioni, a professor and artificial intelligence expert at the University of Washington. “If the production of increasingly diverse and high-quality text becomes automated, how will Google be able to detect search spam?”

Search spam typically refers to Web sites, usually with simple answers or lists, that seem to be tailored to try to get high rankings from Google’s search engine, and thus attract ads. Google periodically tweaks its algorithms to drop the rankings of such sites, but it is a never-ending arms race.

In that digital arms race, Mr. Etzoni added, Narrative Science could be a “nuclear weapon.”

Narrative Science says it has not sold its technology to such sites, often called “content farms.”